Variant Perceptions of Health Professionals in Turkey in Interwar Period Tuberculosis and COVID-19

This paper analyzes the historical development of the visual discourse on health professionals in Turkey by comparing the public health communication of tuberculosis in the interwar period with COVID-19. The variation of scientific knowledge’s authority has always projected through the state direction of biopolitics in the communication of the pandemic and thereby reflected in the imagination of health professionals’ role in biopolitical command. Visual communication practices, especially for its easy access for diverse segments of the public, have been used to plot how subjects need to organize their bodily gestures and define both individual and social realities of how “healthy” subjects can be captured. In recent years, in Turkey, we experienced a visible increase in the number of violent acts against medical practitioners. We agree that the evolution of contemporary health professionals' imagery demonstrates how discontent appears regarding the value of medical practice with biopolitical discourse. Thus, biopolitical visuality encompasses affective sensibilities and imaginations about the nation and its health professions in health crises. Analyzing the biopolitical discourse in visual materials from the interwar period of tuberculosis and COVID-19 will shed light on the shifting forms of vulnerability. Our analysis is based on the research findings of the state-funded project "Analysis of Public Health Visual Communication Methods”. The analysis is based on the critical multimodal discourse analysis that we conducted on these two distinct public health communication We contend that it is urgent to acknowledge the role of biopolitical state historical development through communicative assets to deduct how reflections of systematic changes affect the imagery of health professionals and reveal shifts in the perception of who should be involved in decision-making processes and how normative notions of individual freedom and responsibility intersect with biological factors.